Both NVidia and Samsung have been hyping their quad-core system-on-a-chip monsters but the smug on their face is about to get wiped. NVidia’s, at least.
That’s because Texas Instruments, not to be left out of the whole quad-core SoC mash-up, has released a video showcasing its OMAP 5 brute power. More specifically, it’s the OMAP 5430 with two A15 cores helped by two companion M4 cores alongisde a SGX544 MP2 graphics chip. It takes on the ASUS Transformer Prime with its 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex A9 (Tegra 3, or 4-PLUS-1) beating in its shell.
Naturally, to show its system off, TI organized a comparison test between the two Cortex A15 cores and four A9s in a direct battle of rendering 20 HTML5 pages while downloading a video and playing music. Here’s how it went.
The multi-core chip from Texas Instruments won the battle without breaking a sweat. The reason for this is simple. Even though the Cortex A15s used in the TI OMAP 5430 are only clocked at 800MHz, they are built using the 28nm process, while the Cortex A9′s are on the 32nm process. This means more transistors and thus higher performance despite of the lower clock speed.
Texas Instruments expect their new OMAP 5 series of processors to start appearing in devices in late 2012 or early 2013. Just in time for the next Nexus smartphone?
